Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik

Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik PDF Author: Anne Fletcher
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809328802
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik explores the life and work of the pioneering scene designer whose career spanned decades in American theatre. Anne Fletcher’s insightful volume draws intriguing parallels and contrasts between Gorelik’s productions and the theatrical movements of the twentieth century, exposing the indelible mark he left on the stage. Through in-depth analysis of his letters, diaries, designs, and theoretical works, Fletcher examines the ways in which Gorelik’s productions can be used as a mirror to reflect the shifting dramatic landscapes of his times. Fletcher places Gorelik against the colorful historical backdrops that surrounded him—including the avant-garde movement of the 1920s, World War II, the Cold War, and absurdism—using the designer’s career as a window into the theatre during these eras. Within these cultural contexts, Gorelik sought to blaze his own unconventional path through the realms of theatre and theory. Fletcher traces Gorelik’s tenures with such companies as the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, and the Theatre Union, as well as his relationships with icons such as Bertolt Brecht, revealing how his interactions with others influenced his progressive designs and thus set the stage for major dramatic innovations. In particular, Fletcher explores Gorelik’s use of scenic metaphor: the employment of stage design techniques to subtly enhance the tone or mood of a production. Fletcher also details the designer’s written contributions to criticism and theory, including the influential volume New Theatres for Old, as well as other articles and publications. In addition to thorough examinations of several of Gorelik’s most famous projects, Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik contains explications of productions by such legends as John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller. Also included are numerous full-color and black-and-white illustrations of Gorelik’s work, most of which have never been available to the public until now. More than simply a portrait of one man, this indispensable volume is a cultural history of American theatre as seen through the career of a visionary designer and theoretician.

Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik

Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik PDF Author: Anne Fletcher
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809328802
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik explores the life and work of the pioneering scene designer whose career spanned decades in American theatre. Anne Fletcher’s insightful volume draws intriguing parallels and contrasts between Gorelik’s productions and the theatrical movements of the twentieth century, exposing the indelible mark he left on the stage. Through in-depth analysis of his letters, diaries, designs, and theoretical works, Fletcher examines the ways in which Gorelik’s productions can be used as a mirror to reflect the shifting dramatic landscapes of his times. Fletcher places Gorelik against the colorful historical backdrops that surrounded him—including the avant-garde movement of the 1920s, World War II, the Cold War, and absurdism—using the designer’s career as a window into the theatre during these eras. Within these cultural contexts, Gorelik sought to blaze his own unconventional path through the realms of theatre and theory. Fletcher traces Gorelik’s tenures with such companies as the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, and the Theatre Union, as well as his relationships with icons such as Bertolt Brecht, revealing how his interactions with others influenced his progressive designs and thus set the stage for major dramatic innovations. In particular, Fletcher explores Gorelik’s use of scenic metaphor: the employment of stage design techniques to subtly enhance the tone or mood of a production. Fletcher also details the designer’s written contributions to criticism and theory, including the influential volume New Theatres for Old, as well as other articles and publications. In addition to thorough examinations of several of Gorelik’s most famous projects, Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik contains explications of productions by such legends as John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller. Also included are numerous full-color and black-and-white illustrations of Gorelik’s work, most of which have never been available to the public until now. More than simply a portrait of one man, this indispensable volume is a cultural history of American theatre as seen through the career of a visionary designer and theoretician.

The Group Theatre

The Group Theatre PDF Author: Helen Krich Chinoy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137294604
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
The Group Theatre , a groundbreaking ensemble collective, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history, based on over thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy.

Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America

Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America PDF Author: E. Essin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137108398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism

American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism PDF Author: David Bisaha
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809338742
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"By asking readers to understand how the profession of scenic design was constructed and drawing attention to the work of talented but overlooked women, queer, and Black designers, this book expands the canon of design history and gives insight into how and why some designers were excluded from the professionalization of scenic design"--

British Avant-Garde Theatre

British Avant-Garde Theatre PDF Author: C. Warden
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137020695
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book explores an under-researched body of work from the early decades of the twentieth century, connecting plays, performances and practitioners together in dynamic dialogues. Moving across national, generational and social borders, the book reads experiments in Britain during this period alongside theatrical innovations overseas.

Death in American Texts and Performances

Death in American Texts and Performances PDF Author: Mark Pizzato
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317154444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
How do twentieth and twenty-first century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? Death in American Texts and Performances takes up this question to explore the modern and postmodern aesthetics of death. Working between and across genres, the contributors examine literary texts and performance media, including Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, Luis Valdez' Dark Root of a Scream, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man, and HBO's Six Feet Under. As the contributors struggle to convey the artist's crisis of representation, they often locate the dilemma in the gap between artifice and nature, where loss is performed and where re-membering is sometimes literally reenacted through the bodily gesture. While artists confront the impossibility of total recovery or transformation, so must the contributors explore the gulf between real corpses and their literary or performative reconstructions. Ultimately, the volume shows both artist and critic grappling with the dilemma of showing how the aesthetics of death as absence is made meaningful in and by language.

Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1930s

Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1930s PDF Author: Anne Fletcher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350153605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935) and Golden Boy (1937); * Lillian Hellman: The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Days to Come (1936); * Langston Hughes: Mulatto (1935), Mule Bone (1930, with Zora Neale Hurston) and Little Ham (1936); * Gertrude Stein: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927, published in 1932) and Listen to Me (1936).

Theatre History Studies 2010, Vol. 30

Theatre History Studies 2010, Vol. 30 PDF Author: Rhona Justice-Malloy
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817371079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Theatre History Studies journal, editor Rhona Justice-Malloy and the Mid-America Theatre Conference have collected a special-themed volume covering the past and present of African and African American theatre. Topics included range from modern theatrical trends and challenges in Zimbabwe and Kenya, and examining the history and long-range impact of Paul Robeson’s groundbreaking and troubled life and career, to gender issues in the work of Ghanaian playwright Efo Kodjo Mawugbe, and the ways that 19th-century American blackness was defined through Othello and Desdemona. This collection fills a vacancy in academic writing. Readers will enjoy it; academics can incorporate it into their curriculum; and students will find it helpful and illuminating.

Great North American Stage Directors Volume 2

Great North American Stage Directors Volume 2 PDF Author: Jonathan Chambers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350189359
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
This volume assesses the accomplishments of three mid-20th century, North American stage directors: Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, and Margo Jones. Though their theatre-making endeavours were distinct, each produced work that challenged preconceived notions of theatre-making, all while working within the structure of a company. As directors drawn to the potential rewards of collaboration, all also were keenly adept at understanding how the relationship with a company of collaborators is often marked by struggle and crisis. The essays in this volume explore how these accomplished directors not only created bold work, but also drew on the complex energies of the theatre companies with which they worked to reimagine the shape and scope of theatre directing. The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work of twenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each major North American theatre director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.

Shadowed Cocktails

Shadowed Cocktails PDF Author: Donald R. Anderson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809385902
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
An important and prolific playwright, Philip Barry wrote hit plays such as The Philadelphia Story and Holiday. However, he has been largely forgotten and no book-length analysis of his work has appeared in more than forty years. With this book, Donald R. Anderson rescues the playwright from obscurity. Although Barry’s successes were with comedies of manners, he also wrote dramatic and experimental works. Anderson analyzes all of Barry’s plays (twenty-one in total) and questions the traditional characterization of the American playwright’s work. He begins with Barry’s early plays concerning intergenerational tensions and lessons learned from the Great War. Subsequent chapters explore Barry’s preoccupation with fidelity and infidelity, his struggles with his Catholic beliefs, and his investigations into sources of evil and despair. Anderson also looks at the plays of the late 1930s and the 1940s, including the posthumously produced Second Threshold. One chapter is devoted to Barry’s synergistic relationship with Katharine Hepburn: her role in lifting the playwright out of a mid-1930s slump and his role in rescuing her from the label of “box-office poison” with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love. Anderson places Barry within the context of his times but also shows him drawing on past influences and anticipating theatrical developments of the latter part of the twentieth century. Part cultural history, part literary analysis, Shadowed Cocktails is sure to revitalize interest in this remarkable American author. and his role in rescuing her from the label of 'box-office poison' with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love.